


The Red Balloon

by syllogismos



Category: Fringe, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Grief/Mourning, POV First Person, Post-Reichenbach, Suicidal Ideation, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-19
Updated: 2013-05-19
Packaged: 2017-12-12 06:50:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syllogismos/pseuds/syllogismos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>From the personal blog of Dr. John H. Watson.</em>
</p>
<p>What you have to understand is that watching Sherlock jump from the roof of Bart’s wasn’t just watching him jump from Bart’s. It wasn’t <em>only</em> that, not for me. For me, it was also watching him <em>not</em> jump from the edge of a building in New York City, almost two years ago now. It was one of the strangest cases we ever worked on together.</p>
<p>(Crossover with Fringe s1e17 "Bad Dreams"—i.e., the Nick Lane episode.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Red Balloon

**Author's Note:**

> More here for _Sherlock_ fans than _Fringe_ fans, I think. It's more _Sherlock_ characters interacting with _Fringe_ characters than vice versa, if that makes sense.
> 
> Please heed the warnings: do not read this if the fictional portrayal of suicide and suicidal ideation will trigger or upset you.
> 
> Thanks to [trashyfiction](http://archiveofourown.org/users/trashyfiction/pseuds/trashyfiction) for beta. All remaining missteps (and I'm sure there are many) are my own. Thanks also to #antidiogenes for general writerly support.

_[DRAFT SAVED 2012–06–15 23:41:34]_

What you have to understand is that watching Sherlock jump from the roof of Bart’s wasn’t just watching him jump from Bart’s. It wasn’t _only_ that, not for me. For me, it was also watching him _not_ jump from the edge of a building in New York City, almost two years ago now. 908 Broadway. It was a near thing then, or at least it felt like a near thing. In comparison, watching him on top of Bart’s, I had no idea. I didn’t know what he was up to, and I certainly didn’t think it was…what he did.

And what did he do? ‘Fall’ makes it sound like an accident, but it wasn’t. ‘Jump’ is also the wrong word. There was no lift, no spring, no air under his feet. ‘Dive’? ‘Dive’ implies water or at the very least head-down positioning. He tossed his phone to the side and then he…whatever he did, he did it deliberately. Perhaps there isn’t a word for it.

In any case, I’ve decided to post this here because I want to thank everyone for all the support. I believe in Sherlock, but I was honestly surprised to see how many of you—you who have never met him (and never will, now)—believe in him too. I want to thank you for the support and share something that I can’t help thinking about, whenever I remember him and how his life ended (or, how he ended his life, I should say).

We’d been in New York for a case, of course. And it was a case I’d asked him to take, for a friend of mine. The details aren’t important, and in any case it never became public. It was an easy case, the kind of thing that Sherlock never would have taken, but he could be generous, sometimes, when it came to what I wanted. (And, I suspect, maybe, he wanted to see New York City, although he’d never have admitted to that. He would have considered it a betrayal of his loyalty to London.)

The real story is what happened after we’d wrapped the case we came for, and it was my fault, I suppose. I’d put the television on to the news while Sherlock was showering and I was choking down a cup of hotel-coffee-machine swill. He was just out of the shower when the report came on: a schoolteacher, returning home from the circus with her 18-month-old daughter, had thrown herself onto the tracks in front of a subway train. Suicide.

“Obviously it wasn’t a suicide!”

It used to annoy me, of course, how many things Sherlock declared to be _obvious_. But this one was a bit of a surprise. Sherlock had listened until the end of the report about the suicide and then clicked the telly off, frowning in the way he had when he was thinking. “No one kills herself in front of her toddler,” he’d said after a few moments. I’d given him a _look_ , which had annoyed him. “Oh don’t look at me like _that_!” He’d thrown up his hands in frustration. “This is not some _subtlety_ ,” he spat the ‘t’ out sharply, “of human sentiment.” Another puff of air on the final ‘t.’ “This is _biology_.”

Two hours later found us in Grand Central Terminal, both of us taking a moment to admire the turquoise, star-spangled ceiling. (Remembering it now, I am reminded of another time when Sherlock expressed admiration for stars, glimpsed through a gap when we were walking under a bridge. He said they were beautiful, and I protested on the basis of him not being arsed to know whether the Earth goes round the sun or vice versa, and he protested right back. “Doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it,” he said. I didn’t have much time to think about it then, but I find myself wondering these days what other things Sherlock appreciated that I didn’t know. He was a mystery, was Sherlock Holmes, and I miss him.)

Sherlock had also wrinkled his nose at the larger-than-large American flag hanging in the terminal, and I’d laughed to myself, watching him. Somehow he’d known exactly how to navigate from the atrium past a bunch of shops and down into the subway station. As usual, I just followed him, down an escalator and then down a flight of stairs until we happened upon three people: two women with badges (one NYPD, one something else), and a man with some kind of ID strung around his neck on a lanyard.

The non-NYPD badge hung back and turned to the man, who appeared to be her companion. She spoke in a low voice. “There’s gonna be a balloon floating on the ceiling. A red one.”

The man preceded her down the stairs, and Sherlock followed.

When I stepped onto the platform and found Sherlock, he was already long strides away, looking up at a red balloon hovering at the ceiling. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to convince him to let this case alone, after that. He had this expression on his face, just a little half-smile, but so much more than that if you knew him like I did. This was Sherlock surprised, and Sherlock surprised was Sherlock pleased.

Sherlock surprised was also Sherlock at his most tolerant. The air down on the platform was stuffy, with a disturbing (but gentle) and unnatural-seeming breeze coming from the tunnel, wafting the smell of garbage and urine up from the tracks. But, after spotting the red balloon, Sherlock didn’t seem bothered by the putrid, stagnant air and the gum-spotted platform, although he’d spent hours upon hours since we’d arrived in New York complaining about the inferiority of the taxis and pavement and even (spuriously, I thought) about the low quality of American nicotine patches. He was working now, and like always, I watched him work and enjoyed it. I observed him mapping out the geography of the scene: where the security cameras were, and the blind spots, and the possible places for someone to hide without being spotted, or just without being _obvious_.

Eventually I shifted my attention to the woman and her companion. They were conferring in low voices on the platform, her looking out at the tracks, him looking up at the balloon. It was odd, I thought, how determined she seemed to ignore the balloon whose presence she’d predicted. I stepped closer but clasped my hands behind my back and looked away, so that I could listen in without being conspicuous about it.

“The husband was away on business in Seattle. He just flew back in. He’s giving a statement down at the station,” the man said.

“Come on, this doesn’t fit the profile. Married, a baby. You don’t take your kid to the circus and then give them a front-row seat to watch you kill yourself,” the woman replied.

“And then there’s that,” the man murmured. Dunham looked to him, then followed his gaze to the ceiling, to the red balloon.

“Yeah,” she said.

I could understand Sherlock’s fascination: this was an odd one. Not just the odd suicide, but the woman and the red balloon. It gave _me_ the willies.

* * *

It turned out that the case was being taken over from the NYPD by the balloon-predicting woman (Special Agent Olivia Dunham, FBI) and her partner, Peter Bishop (FBI consultant). I got caught up in conversation with the NYPD detective while Sherlock was persuading Dunham to let us on the case. I’m not sure how he did it, but I wasn’t particularly surprised that he succeeded. Sherlock was always good at persuading people (myself included) to let him have his way.

We went to the police precinct next, where the suicide’s surviving husband was upset, going on and on about how his wife wouldn’t have killed herself. It wasn’t anything unusual, and I was even beginning to question the oddness of the case again. It wasn’t uncommon, after all, for a suicide to shock immediate friends and family, for it to “come out of nowhere” or come after a period of (perhaps bordering on manic) happiness and contentment.

It wasn’t like that with Sherlock, of course. Not that I saw it coming, but there were moments preceding his suicide that, in hindsight, should have been warnings. There was a time when he made me take a separate cab home because he needed to think and I might have _talked_ , but looking back I think maybe that was when he had decided, and he couldn’t bear to be around me any longer. He knew it was going to hurt me. (That’s the coldest of cold comforts, realising that he _knew_ what I’d be going through, what I _am_ going through now.)

Our conversation just before his arrest for the Bruhl kidnapping was a hint too. We talked about Moriarty’s plan to cast him as a fraud, and Sherlock was very concerned not with what other people would think, but with what _I_ thought. He was concerned about his legacy in _my_ mind. He was concerned about it because he knew he was going to be leaving me, although I didn’t see it then.

But back to the story of our time in New York: finally we were all called back into another room to watch the retrieved surveillance footage of the subway suicide. It revealed the expected: a woman leaping in front of an oncoming train just as it was pulling into the station. Dunham asked to see the tape replayed at a slower speed, and Sherlock frowned and leaned closer, edging around her while I resisted the urge to hold him back. Dunham didn’t seem to mind the invasion of her personal space; she only stood straight, backed up half a step, and requested a copy of the footage, something near desperation colouring her voice.

Neither Dunham nor Bishop seemed particularly surprised that Sherlock wanted us to come along, when they were ready to leave the precinct and head back to ‘the lab.’

“Tell me again why Scotland Yard is interested?” Dunham had asked.

“I believe I can help,” Sherlock had answered, deflecting.

Dunham had looked at Sherlock then, staring him down in a way that was odd for me to watch since I was accustomed to being the one on the other end of staring contests with Sherlock. Then she’d shrugged. “Fine,” she’d said and turned to go.

* * *

‘The lab’, it turned out, was not in New York City, but in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the basement of a Harvard building. I almost groaned aloud on stepping foot inside: it was not going to be easy, getting Sherlock to leave this place. It was like our kitchen in 221B only much, _much_ bigger and with, as far as I could see immediately, slightly fewer body parts being experimented on, more cooking equipment (which is to say: there was cooking equipment that hadn’t been obviously repurposed), and a substantial increase in live animals (a cow).

The lab belonged to one Walter Bishop—Dr. Walter Bishop, Peter’s father. When introduced to us, he was unperturbed, even bordering on indifferent. He offered us a share in the handful of liquorice he was holding, and Sherlock made no effort at all to disguise his shudder of disgust. Then Dr. Bishop ignored us, turning to the computer where Dunham had cued up the security footage. He, Dunham, Peter, and Astrid (also FBI and seemingly serving as Dr. Bishop’s assistant) huddled around the monitor. Sherlock, taller than the rest, peered over from behind them, and I just hung back.

The conversation that followed was bizarre in the extreme. Dunham had apparently _dreamt_ the suicide, or, more accurately, had dreamt a homicide: in her dream, she’d been on the platform with the schoolteacher—Risa Pears was her name—and she’d _pushed_ her onto the tracks. Recounting it, she was slightly overwrought, almost manic (if in a somewhat restrained way), fidgeting continuously, unbuttoning her suit jacket and pressing a hand to her abdomen as if to quell her own rapid breathing. It was unbelievable, crazy, completely and utterly bonkers, but Dr. Bishop, apparently a total nutter himself, was going along with it. “Perhaps you compelled her to jump using your mind,” he suggested to Dunham.

Peter, at least, protested. “Stop, both of you. Stop! _Nobody_ killed _anybody_.”

“That’s not _quite_ true,” Sherlock stepped in, and the others stopped and turned to him. “This schoolteacher, Mrs. Pears, _somebody_ killed her. But I find it difficult to believe it was Agent Dunham, in her sleep. Not in the rules, right John?”

“Hm?” Sherlock had lost me, as usual.

“Agent Dunham, in her sleep, with psychic powers. I would think you would object to that as much as to Reverend Green offing himself in the conservatory with the revolver, no?” (This was a joke between us. Sherlock, you must understand, once pinned a Cluedo board to our mantle with a knife after I took exception to his claim that the victim had killed himself.)

“ _Sherlock_.” It was a warning, but I didn’t really know what I was trying to stop him doing. Until he did it.

“There’s a simple way to resolve this,” Sherlock continued, heedless of my warning (again, _as usual_ ). “Let’s put Agent Dunham to sleep and see if she kills again.”

“Yes!” Dr. Bishop exclaimed. “I have just the drug!”

Dr. Bishop, as it turned out, had _many_ drugs and extensive interests in their design, synthesis, and personal use. Interests that he gleefully shared with Sherlock, explaining the theory and practical benefits behind his custom benzo. (For one, he’d explained, it was much less likely than other benzos to cause fatality in withdrawal from dependence. For another, it produced a mild euphoria and a general feeling of blueness—“Blue the colour, not blue ‘the blues’. Although perhaps that’s just me. I’ve mostly just tested this formulation on myself.”)

Sherlock watched Dr. Bishop draw up a dose of the drug from a vial and fiddled with one of Dr. Bishop’s spare hypodermics while _I_ watched _Sherlock_ and tried (unsuccessfully) not to imagine Sherlock on his back on our sofa, one hand pressed to the inside of his other elbow, eyes closed against—or, even worse, in ecstatic enjoyment of—a real bell-ringer. (I’ve only seen him enjoy the pale imitation nicotine variety. And no, the rumours of Sherlock’s relapse into the drug habits of his late adolescence are _not_ true, no matter what _The Sun_ ’s been printing. We worried about relapse, those of us that knew him, but to my knowledge it never happened.)

Dunham removed her jacket and accepted Dr. Bishop’s injection into her cephalic with an unaffected sort of stoicism that spoke either to a great deal of trust between her and the elder Bishop or an (alarmingly) established habit. I tried to work out which it might be, but it was too difficult for me to separate out my own impression of Dr. Bishop as an untrustworthy mad scientist type from how she might see him.

Dunham retreated to the sofa in Dr. Bishop’s office with Astrid assigned to observe her in her sleep. And the rest of us, we waited. Dr. Bishop insisted on ordering dinner in, Chinese. Between (and, unfortunately, sometimes through) his own mouthfuls of food, he rambled out a dissertation on westernised Chinese cuisine and the unique features thereof to be found in New York City as opposed to London. Sherlock ignored him with the same kind of cool haughtiness that I’ve seen him employ in interactions with his brother Mycroft, but he also ate a couple of potstickers and stole a few bites of my Kung Pao chicken, so I considered it a successful meal. (Sherlock always hated to eat, when we were on a case; said digestion slowed his thinking.)

When Dunham came out of her drugged sleep, it was with the conviction that she’d done it again, killed again. She was distraught and not hiding it: running her fingers through her hair, staring at and then rubbing at her left hand. Despite the preposterousness of it, we all bundled back into the car, back to New York.

* * *

Sherlock and I followed behind Dunham and Peter, finding our way to the dying stabbing victim’s room in St. Vincent’s hospital. We were just close enough that I could hear Dunham and Peter.

“I tried to kill him,” Dunham said.

Peter, thankfully, tried to inject some sanity into the proceedings: “A _half dozen_ witness statements say she stabbed her husband.”

“Yes, I was there.”

“No, you were _three hundred_ miles away.”

“And somehow, I’m killing these people in my dreams.”

Sherlock snorted in disbelief, a shockingly polite reaction (for him), and one I whole-heartedly agreed with, but I still found myself laying a hand on his arm, pulling him back. This wasn’t our jurisdiction, and now we weren’t just discussing the case with the investigators, we were about to go see the _victim_. 

As it turned out, we weren’t just there to see the victim; the perpetrator of the crime was there too, granted exceptional permission to watch her husband die. I couldn’t stop Sherlock from cutting in during Dunham’s interrogation of the woman, nor would I have wanted to stop him. For once, his interruption was absolutely the right thing.

The perpetrator was meek—nicknamed ‘Mouse’ even. She’d shredded the intestines of her ‘devoted’ husband with her dinner knife during their weekly date out at a nice Italian restaurant. Stunned and regretful, she assented easily to Dunham’s interrogation. But it was when Dunham stepped far over the line, suggesting to ‘Mouse’ in an increasingly tight voice, leaning far forward with elbows on her knees, “Maybe you didn’t mean to hurt him. I mean, maybe somebody made you do it. Like, compelled you,” it was _then_ that Sherlock cut in: “Pedestrian. And completely fallacious. Many murderers describe a feeling of compulsion, but that doesn’t mean their actions weren’t internally caused. It’s the mind’s defence mechanism against guilt and self-loathing. No one wants to see him- or _her_ self as a violent criminal.”

“Thank you,” agreed Peter.

Sherlock ignored Peter’s concession and continued, thinking aloud, “There _must_ be a more fruitful avenue of investigation. This woman is–” I pinched his arm then, afraid of how he was going to finish _that_ sentence. “The crime scene. We need to see the crime scene.”

The crime scene was the red balloon all over again, in a way. Sherlock’s attention was drawn to a broken coffee cup at a table near the window, still not cleaned up, and Dunham followed him, crouching down to finger the shards. Then abruptly she had the (admittedly quite rude) restaurant owner by the collar, demanding to know if it had been _her_ who had been sitting at the table from which the coffee cup had fallen and broken. But it hadn’t been her, of course. According to the restaurant owner, it had been “just some guy.” Blonde hair, with a scar on his face, and the red balloon of it was that Dunham knew _immediately_ who he was talking about. “I know who that is,” she said. And, even stranger, Sherlock added, “So do I.” (And me? I had that feeling, not new to me anymore, but still disconcerting, of following Sherlock around without a clue as to what was really going on.)

Again, not surprisingly, the explanation turned out to be nothing supernatural, nothing beyond the pale, just _good observation_. Dunham and Sherlock both knew the blond man with the scar on his face because they’d seen him in the surveillance video from the train platform. With the aid of the FBI’s resources, he was identified as one Nick Lane, a former mental patient at a local institution, checked out only recently.

At this point the story gets truly strange and literally _incredible_ , and I regret to say that I can’t explain all of it, not just because it’s inexplicable but because many of the facts of the case are protected secrets of the U.S. military to this day. Details and explanations aside, the working hypothesis was this: Nick Lane was a man whose emotions were literally contagious. He was a ‘reverse empath,’ in Dr. Bishop’s terms: his suicidal thoughts had caused Risa Pears to jump in front of the train; his fear of abandonment had resulted in ‘Mouse’ lashing out and stabbing her husband. And Dunham had dreamt it all because she had a special connection with him.

The next step was drugging Dunham again. (Obviously her unflinchingness towards Dr. Bishop’s drugs was habit, I decided then, not trust.) Dr. Bishop wanted to “tune her antenna in” to Nick Lane’s thoughts, to test the hypothesis and perhaps track him down. Incredible as it still is for me to recount, it worked spectacularly. She “tuned in”: she could feel what he was feeling, and see what he was seeing. She tuned in so well that when Lane was apparently engaged in some carnal pleasures, Dunham started whimpering and moaning. Astrid, and Peter, and Dr. Bishop—in that order—caught on to the situation nearly as quickly as I did, but Sherlock, as always spectacularly ignorant about some things, did not. (I only share this, a great deal more intimate than his not knowing the Prime Minister, because he’s gone and cannot sulk at me for making it public.)

“Will it be dangerous for her if he gets hurt?” Sherlock asked.

Peter, Astrid, and Dr. Bishop all looked to me to do the explaining, which annoyed Sherlock even more. “How would _John_ know?”

“Sherlock, he’s not getting hurt.” And then I couldn’t stop myself adding, “Or if he is, he’s enjoying it.”

“What? That makes–”

Dunham moaned again, long and low, and her mouth formed itself into a rather evocative ‘o’.

“Oh,” Sherlock echoed.

“Yes,” I said, for lack of anything else to say. It was Dr. Bishop, surprisingly, who helped move the moment along by offering Sherlock candy. Chocolate-covered wafer and peanut butter biscuits first, then jelly beans, and liquorice again when Sherlock had refused the first two. Sherlock declined the liquorice too, with a desperate “Sugar dulls my brain!” Dr. Bishop looked both horrified and hurt at this, but then Dunham started to speak.

“He’s feeling guilt,” she said. “Shame. He feels dirty. He hates himself. He wishes he was dead.” She narrated it all for us then from her trance, as Lane infected his partner with his own self-loathing and she killed herself. Dr. Bishop talked Dunham through the aftermath, not letting her escape Lane’s mind because we still had no idea where Lane _was_ and now there was another victim to find.

* * *

Lane’s flat was empty by the time we got there, but then Dunham got a call: positive ID on Nick Lane, entering a building near Gramercy Park.

When we arrived, there were NYPD on the scene already because Nick Lane hadn’t just entered the building. He’d gone up to the roof, to the ledge, and there were others with him, infected with his suicidal thoughts.

“You don’t want to go up there,” the commanding officer protested on our approach. “We already sent a guy up, now he’s on the ledge too. We don’t know what the hell’s going on up there.”

“It’s OK, officer,” Dunham assured him, and she walked past him into the building. Sherlock followed close on her heels, and so I had no choice but to follow too.

There were eight people on that roof, spaced out on the ledge like birds on a wire. Nick Lane, and seven others, one a police officer. What followed I honestly can’t recall, although I can play the memory back as images: the steel grey of the sky, the view of the city with construction cranes in the distance, Nick Lane’s face, apparently quite happy to see Dunham. He spoke with her, but I can’t remember hearing the words either of them said. All I remember of that roof is watching Sherlock walk to the edge of it and stand like the others, perfectly still and calm but inches from death.

The wind whipped at Sherlock’s coat, making it fan out to the right at his calves, and that image burnt itself so deeply into my brain that when I remember him at Bart’s, I don’t see it in my mind from where I saw it on the ground below, I see it from behind him with his coat fanning out in the same shape. I hear the clatter of his phone hitting the roof before– I see him take the step. I even _feel_ him take the step because watching him on that roof in New York I felt every step that he took to the edge because they were steps that I wanted to take too. I could feel them in my feet like an itch, a compulsion nearly, but not quite, stronger than I could resist. I did take two steps, although I’d like to believe they were steps of trying to reach out to Sherlock, not steps of Nick Lane.

And then it was over. Dunham took Lane out with two shots to the leg, although not before his thoughts had tipped one woman over the edge of the building. I remember that still, but not as an observer. I remember the air in _my_ face and the oblivion of crushing death. I also remember Sherlock’s hand in mine, as if we fell together. (He took my hand once, later, just after his arrest. I’d chinned the Chief Superintendent for calling Sherlock a weirdo, and we’d been cuffed together and then on the run as soon as Sherlock had cleverly engineered our escape from custody. We’d run hand in hand, and, even then, pushing through the panic of the moment was the not-memory of falling from a roof in New York, hand in hand with Sherlock, falling to our deaths on top of a parked car, dying together from the crunch and buckle of bones and skulls, but still holding on to each other, palm to palm.)

So it was over. When Dunham shot Lane, all the others still on the roof crumpled and fell back from the edge of the building, but not Sherlock. For a second, Sherlock didn’t move from the edge, didn’t move at all; then he stepped back—two measured steps—and turned to face me.

When we left the building, Dunham and the Bishops were occupied with Lane and with the NYPD, so Sherlock and I were left to ourselves, left to enjoy the solidity of the pavement under our feet and smell the caramelising sugar of the nut roaster’s cart on the corner. I remember—I will admit to this, say what you want in the damn comments—I kept standing too close to Sherlock, and he kept edging away from me. We shuffled halfway down the block that way until I could sense Sherlock’s patience wearing thin, so I started looking for something else to occupy us. I certainly didn’t want to talk about what had just happened, and I didn’t think Sherlock wanted to either.

We were lucky: we’d shuffled along until we were straight in front of a bakery. Sherlock hadn’t eaten all day, and the case was over now, so it was perfect. Food. And perhaps tea.

“Fancy a tea break?” I cocked my head toward the shop, and I had to resist the urge to slow down as I walked through the door—again, I will admit this _now_ —because I wanted to feel him at my back, in the flesh, solid and real and warm with continued life. We stood side by side studying the menu, and I contented myself with feeling Sherlock’s coat brush my leg. “You could also stand to eat something,” I suggested.

Sherlock couldn’t be arsed, as usual, so I ordered us teas and a black and white cookie each, apparently a local delicacy. We took a four-top in the corner, tucking ourselves in next to the wall and across from each other. I concentrated on eating while Sherlock sipped his tea and ignored his cookie: nothing out of the ordinary.

And then there was something out of the ordinary. Or, rather, _someone_. That someone was a man, and he approached without me even being aware of it. One second he wasn’t there, and in the next he was seating himself next to me. He was severely dressed in a black suit, crisp white shirt, plain black tie, and a dark grey fedora banded in black. This last he removed as he took his seat, revealing a smooth, pale, and completely bald pate. He lacked even eyebrows.

“Who–?” I started, and I don’t know why I stopped except that the man was so intent on Sherlock.

“I am going to tell you something very important,” he said to Sherlock. He spoke slowly, and his consonants were sort of _curled_ in a way that sounded foreign, but I couldn’t pin it to any particular accent. Sherlock seemed uncharacteristically captivated: no retort, no immediate deductive observations, just steady eye contact and an almost imperceptible nod indicating the man to continue.

“I cannot say too much,” he continued. “I– My _interference_ is no longer going unnoticed, and one day soon I shall be punished for it.” He paused and turned to consider me briefly before looking back to Sherlock. “But that is not your concern. You need to remember this: one day a man will say something to you. He will say these words: ‘Falling’s just like flying except there’s a more permanent destination.’” Another half-turn towards me and then his attention back to Sherlock. “Start planning, on that day. You will need a plan.”

The man rose from his chair and half turned to go, then turned back. Several seconds passed before he spoke; perhaps he was hesitating, undecided. His face was so blank and still it’s hard to say.

“I may be able to help you, when that day comes,” he said. “But I cannot promise. I cannot see for certain.”

Sherlock turned around to watch him go, and he watched the door even after the bald man had gone. When he turned back to me, his expression was completely and entirely too serious for my taste.

“A very odd nutter, that one was,” I commented. I was desperate for Sherlock to proclaim the man crazy, but something in my gut knew already that he wouldn’t. His expression, if anything, grew more somber: it was a look I’d never seen on him before and only saw on him once again, during the Bruhl case. I only caught the look in profile then, him looking out the windows of Scotland Yard, seeing _something_.

“Why weren’t you affected by Lane?” Sherlock asked me.

“ _Sherlock_.” My protest came out barely above a whisper. I wanted to look away because I did _not_ want to talk about _this_ , but I couldn’t look away.

“John. _Please_.” Sherlock leaned forward. “Tell me?”

Sherlock so rarely requested things of me. Demanded, yes. Ordered, yes. Requested— _politely_ , with a ‘please’ and actual interrogative intonation—no.

“He _did_ affect me,” I admitted. “Just the same as you.”

“But you didn’t–”

I broke eye contact. He was my best friend, but there were some things I still didn’t want to tell him. I looked at his untouched cookie and half-drunk tea, and I studied his long pale fingers resting on the Formica. And then it was the furthest thing from what I wanted, but my eyes slid back up to meet his, and I answered anyway. _Really_ answered. “I have experience,” I said, and I kept my voice quiet and measured, “fighting those kinds of feelings. I’ve faced them down before. I wasn’t unaffected. I just– It got easier. It made it easier to– To feel it, but not act on it.”

Then it was Sherlock who looked away: it was too much for him, I’m sure, just as it was a bit too much for him when he’d asked me the night after we’d met what I’d say in my last dying moments. He’d ridiculed my choice of words, then, and he’d told me to use my imagination, and it had been _too much_ when I’d told him that I didn’t have to. This was even worse, letting Sherlock in on the fact that not only have I been near death, I’ve _wanted_ it and had practice resisting the desire to take it for myself. A lot of people, myself included, thought of Sherlock as not quite human, as different. But he was very human, the most _human_ human. Really it was the other way around. He saw _me_ as something else, as different from other people, and he couldn’t take knowing my weaknesses and my mortality.

I’m putting this all down now because I wonder about that strange man and his strange pronouncement. It was days after Bart’s that I remembered him and his words. It had been too much at first, a stretch of events that defied understanding—a taxi ride, a phone call, my hand stretched up and his stretched out, “Goodbye John,” a phone tossed to the side, the shape of a coat fanning out to the right in a New York winter wind, a fall, a crash, then blood and limpness and lifelessness. But eventually I did remember, and I remembered more of Sherlock’s words too, from that phone call. At one point he said, “It’s a trick. Just a magic trick.” I don’t know why, but now that reminds me of the man and his “You will need a plan.” Sherlock’s words and those words seem to slot together now, even if there’s not an obvious connection. And I remember “I may be able to help you, when that day comes,” and I wonder.

_[DRAFT DELETED 2012–06–16 09:56:02]_

_[POST PUBLISHED 2012–06–16 11:20:22]_

He was my best friend and I’ll always believe in him.

**Author's Note:**

> September's appearance in "Bad Dreams" is actually just before Olivia goes up to the roof with Nick, so it's not so far-fetched to believe that he hung around to Observe and talk to Sherlock afterwards.
> 
> The black and white cookies were inspired by the fact that I tracked down [the location of the Nick Lane building on Google Maps](https://maps.google.com/maps?q=908+Broadway,+New+York,+NY&hl=en&ll=40.739378,-73.989629&spn=0.00043,0.000577&sll=40.002498,-75.118033&sspn=0.314538,0.591202&oq=908+broadw&t=h&hnear=908+Broadway,+New+York,+10003&z=21&layer=c&cbll=40.739385,-73.989697&panoid=C6J2Phg-lifnXAPbyg1G8Q&cbp=12,63.14,,0,-63.39) and saw that there is a [Zaro's Bakery](http://www.zaro.com/) on the block. Zaro's makes _the best_ black and white cookies.


End file.
